Manufacturing Culture:
Culture as Global Industries
Module 4
Mass Culture
THE CONTEXT OF GLOBALISATION
Introduction to Economic Cultural Mass
Globalisation Aspects of Aspects of Culture
Globalisation Globalisation
CASE STUDIES OF CULTURE INDUSTRIES
Sony Popular Music Fashion
Corporation Industry Industry
Cinema International
Industry News Agencies
THE ROLE OF MARKETING AND ADVERTISING
IN GLOBAL CULTURE INDUSTRIES
Marketing Advertising
Culture Industry
What are the “Culture Industries”?
• Difficult to define – on one level ALL industries
are culture industries because they are
involved in the production and consumption of
culture eg cars, food etc
• If we choose a definition based on primary
function, this can be narrowed to those
primarily involving signifying systems. So the
primary function of food is sustenance and cars
is transport. Signification is secondary
What are the “Culture Industries”?
• So, a culture industry can be defined as:
“The signifying system through which
necessarily a social order is
communicated, reproduced, experienced
and explored” (Raymond Williams, 1981,
p. 13) or as:
Industries and institutions which are directly
involved in the production of social
meaning (Hesmondhalgh, 2002, p. 11)
Examples of Culture Industries
• Television
• Radio
• Cinema
• Newspaper, magazine & book publishing
• Music recording and publishing
• Advertising
• Performing arts
• The primary aim of all these culture
industries is to communicate to an
audience, or, in other words, to create a
text (Hesmondhalgh, 2002, p. 12)
• Fashion is therefore the “odd one out” in
our case studies as its primary function is
to clothe, but it also has the secondary
function of creating a text about ourselves
• As well as fashion, we could include as
“peripheral culture industries” or
“borderline cases” the following:
• Sport (does its competitive aspect rule it
out?)
• Consumer electronics and hardware
• Computer software
• Art (not really an industry)
• Theatre (not really an industry)
• Tourism
THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL &
“MASS CULTURE”
• Max Horkheimer
and Theodor Adorno…
Adorno and Horkheimer
• Writing during and after WW2 in Germany
(Frankfurt) and the USA (briefly)
• Concerned with new culture industries of
cinema and radio (esp. popular music)
• Concerned with the effects of „mass
culture‟ on individuals and on culture
THE THEORY OF MASS
CULTURE
• Feared cultural homogenisation (like
Leavis & Kant)
• saw mass culture as exploitation of the
working class by industrial capitalism
• the metaphor for mass culture was mass
production (assembly line goods)
• critiqued capitalism as the cause of mass
culture
CRITICAL THEORY
• The Frankfurt School‟s critique of mass
culture was called „Critical Theory‟
• They were writing in the context of WW2
and the post-war industrial reconstruction
• The technologies of mass entertainment
were firmly established
Radio was firmly established as
a one-way commercial
broadcast medium, instead of
only two-way communication
Even television was beginning
to make an appearance
Cinema had made a major
technological change from silent
film to talkies
“The sound film, far surpassing the
theatre of illusion, leaves no room
for imagination or reflection on the
part of the audience, who is unable
to respond within the structure of
the film, yet deviate from its precise
detail without losing the thread of
the story; hence the film forces its
victims to equate it directly with
reality.” (Horkheimer & Adorno,
ALLEGED EFFECTS OF THE
NEW CULTURE INDUSTRIES
ON CULTURE
• Standardisation
– technical and aesthetic standards
• Homogenisation
– a sameness about mass-produced culture
• Commodification
– mass culture could be bought and sold
– use value (intrinsic enjoyment) replaced by
exchange value only (is this fair?)
MASS CULTURE‟S ALLEGED
EFFECTS ON AUDIENCES
• Mind-numbing
• Culture industries created passive,
uncritical audiences
• Culture industries manufactured needs
and wants among audiences, for the
industrialised assembly line to satisfy
• Culture industries were inextricably part of
capitalist production
CONTRADICTIONS WITHIN
MASS CULTURE
• Infinite reproducibility of cultural artefacts
and individual differences
– technical reproducibility (examples?)
– social reproducibility (examples?)
• But simultaneously an ideology of
individualisation
This led to two
new concepts
being formed ….
I’m an
individual
Pseudo-Individualisation is the
appearance of
individualisation, even though
something may be virtually the
same as another cultural (or
material) product.
Pseudo-Individualisation is the
continual search for what will
make THIS product
DIFFERENT from those that
went before it.
The other concept was PART
INTERCHANGEABILITY
Part interchangeability refers to
the fact that many of the parts of
cultural products such as
popular music are
interchangeable with other
parts.
This leads to „new‟ music being
„old‟ music with a new look, or to
How relevant is 1940s Mass
Culture Theory to our current
theories of Globalisation and
our experiences of culture?
Consider:
• International terrorism
• Fears for loss of traditional cultures
• The Internet
• Disneyland
• Shopping malls
Reading for Module 4
• du Gay, ch. 2, pp. 68–83;
• Readings A & B; Activities 1, 2 & 3.